A problem that has existed in the production baking industry involves the stacking or alignment of rounded, relatively flat, baked goods such as English muffins, doughnuts and the like types of items. That is, such items are normally baked in such a way that they emerge from the oven or cooking equipment in a generally horizontal plane, i.e., upon a suitable conveyor. For packaging purposes, groups of such items, as for example a half dozen or dozen or so, must be stacked or aligned and then placed into boxes or bags.
Rapid, efficient alignment or stacking of such type of goods has been done primarily by hand, although various efforts have been made from time to time to develop machinery for that purpose. Since the items are easily broken, are typically packaged while they are still warm, may include coatings or frostings or the like which complicate the handling of them, etc., stacking is a difficult problem to handle with machinery.
Thus, the invention herein seeks to solve the stacking problem by means of providing a mechanism which receives the baked items, one by one, in the horizontal plane, then swings the item into the vertical plane to form a horizontally axised stack by adding such items one by one to the stack until a complete stack is formed. At that point, the mechanism releases the stack as a group into a box or into further equipment for bagging or the like. By handling the baked goods on a one by one basis, and simply adding them to the stack one by one, the items do not rub together or otherwise present problems which might be caused by sticky coatings, surface friction, etc. and in addition will not be broken or damaged even though warm and fragile.
The mechanism herein contemplates a simplified unit which can be used either as a single unit or in banks or groups of such units for multiple stacking and packaging of stacks. Thus, the mechanism essentially replaces manual labor for packaging of such items.